Happy birthday, Ma’am

The tear buds were getting active. Perhaps it had to do with looking down from the height of Mount Everest on an unusually clear day. Perhap...

The tear buds were getting active. Perhaps it had to do with looking down from the height of Mount Everest on an unusually clear day. Perhaps it was the old Asha songs streaming through my laptop earphones. But almost certainly it was a meeting with my English schoolteacher of Class XII — 25 years later. She is now the principal of one of Delhi’s best schools, and I am a bureaucrat in central India. We had hardly met in all these years.

I was wondering, as I went in for my appointment with her, how much she would remember. It was, after all, a quarter of a century ago. She was just the same — a few grey hairs, and a quiet air of authority. After warmly greeting me, she fondly recalled that I had been a star pupil. Boys from my school had done well, and she’d met quite a few who were in Delhi and abroad. I asked her about the school she had created. As she dealt on the initial hiccups, a cute little girl came in to wish her a happy birthday. I kicked myself at having come empty-handed, and resolved to send her a gift from Raipur. The school today had one of the best campuses in Delhi. Her eyes glowed as she told me about the risks she had taken in the initial stages. From 250 students in the first year of operations to 1,200 students in the second — a good lesson for infrastructure development professionals.

There was a football tournament on, and she invited me to join her as she went to start the match off. I felt very proud at being introduced to her colleagues as her student from the first Class XII batch she had taught. Her children are now abroad, and I happily showed her a phone video clip of my wife and daughters. I mentioned how I had plumped for English Literature as my second optional subject, after Management, in the civil service exams. It was because of teachers like her that I still remembered my Shakespeare.

As she met the two teams, I looked behind me at the senior school students. Over 25 years ago, in a very similar classroom on the banks of the Ganga, we were being taught The Wedge-Tailed Eagle, a collection of short stories. I was fooling around with a friend somewhere on the back benches, when she suddenly asked me to share my joke with the class and explain the lesson, my mind ran on empty. I rattled off something about how this was a story of the eternal struggle between man and nature. A weak effort, but she let it pass.

Now I wanted to jump up and lead the assembled students in a full-throated rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, with my vintage ex-student status providing me immunity from her ire. And everyone knew that this was not a tradition at her school. Gowri Ishwaran never did like any unnecessary fanfare, any way.